Thanks Ava for transcribing!

Victoria

I am standing here now looking at you, about to marry you. For years I actually couldn't even look at you in the eye—you know, your gaze is very intense and for someone who has feelings for you, it's really hard. And it took me eight years to tell you that I didn’t have trouble looking into other people’s eyes. And then once you knew, your reaction was to have us play this game where you would hold my head in place, and every time I flinched I had to look at you longer. And eventually I can almost match your eye contact.

Okay, so we've often had long conversations about writing classes or fMRI research, and you know I used to tend to have difficulty expressing myself in words to other people. But just as you helped me feel comfortable looking at you, you've helped me translate my thoughts into words. And you've become the comb of my thoughts as I've told you—translating the world for me and me for the world. And I understand myself better because of you. And ironically these vows are the most important words I'll say, but you wouldn't help me write them. You want them to be "Max-free." But I think I can say these things because really they're not Max-free—you've become a part of me.

I could say I am devoted to you now, but that would be an oversimplification because there's not just a separable me to be devoted to you. Your influence goes back on me so long—ten years ago when we first met in the ninth grade summer school philosophy class. We've changed so much over the years as our relationship grew from friends to a relationship as adults and to being a couple. But I think we fit together more now than we would have before because of how we've affected each other over the years.

You taught me how to laugh. You taught me how to play. You taught me the importance of imagination. I understand the necessity of comedy in life now, whether we're talking about ABC's The Bachelor or we're talking about cancer. But I understand the importance of play in a way I didn't when I was a kid, and how to find silliness in the world and in other people. And I understand how imagination can transform the world. You showed me the world is not just something to understand but something to make more beautiful by transforming it.

My favorite games are when we walk and you ask questions that can change our surroundings like: "Which bite of this food tastes the best and why?" "How can we make this fountain a metaphor for a new religion?" "Which flower here would be which family member?" And I can look into your future where we can be each other's second set of eyes, opening each other to our own ways of perceiving. And I know for you that's the most personal thing I can do—to be receptive to how you see as part of how I see and to share that with other people. And I think we're not just interested in the other's point of view, but through our trying out each other's perspective, we're trying to push each other to love the world more.

I have learned so much from the way you love. I've learned so much from the way love is so very tied up with your sense of purpose in life. One time, describing who we are as a couple, you said: "I think we think demonstrating love is what makes the world go around, but we're here on earth to find love and introduce others to love as best we can." But I think that really expresses the core of your moral beliefs—that you want to make the world a more beautiful place, more full of love. And there's a sense of urgency in how you love other people.

Also, you give the best hugs. And you told me you have to hug with your whole body, accepting the other person, and you don't just receive a hug—you actively engage in it. And I think it's your literal way of adding more love into the world.

There was a moment when we actually decided to get married—a while before we got engaged. It was in spring and we were visiting my family in London, and we'd had a really great day and we went on a long walk. And then at the end you said: "Every day I tell you how much I love you, but I want to be able to tell you how much I love you more than yesterday. But the only way I can ever think to say it is 'I want to marry you.’” And so what do we do now? If we're getting married today—what do we do tomorrow?

I promise to hug you every day with my whole body.

I promise to always play and laugh in our world with you, whether in our kitchen, a hospital, or a comedy show.

And just as you express my thoughts, I promise to always love the parts of you that trouble you or confuse you.

I promise to take care of you and to protect you.

I promise to emulate the resilience you've shown me when we face difficult roads.

I promise to celebrate the universe of each moment we have with each other for the rest of our lives.

And I promise to tell you every day—and in the way I look at you and in the words I use—how much I love you more than yesterday.

Max

Hey Victoria, thank you so much for coming today—it means a lot to me. Everyone else, thank you so much for coming too.

Writing these vows is tough, Victoria, because I need to help everyone else understand what you mean to me. And we've spent so long teaching each other a shared language, making meaning with each other, that it's hard to imagine communicating meaningfully about our love without our private symbols or rituals.

For example, it's important that I vow to you today that every night for the rest of our lives I will "peel the banana." That won't mean anything to anyone else—let me explain. Don't worry, I have this well-curated.

Every night before bed, I apply pressure to Victoria's forehead and peel back her hair, switching off between my hands. I like doing this because I'm putting my hand close to her brain and then close to her beautiful, shiny hair. And those are two things I love very much about Victoria. I also like feeling like I'm kindling a little fire since my hands get warm and her hair is like beautiful golden straw. All her troubles will get burned in this fire and she can then sleep more easily.

I think Victoria has many reasons why she likes this, but it's really her business to share how the ritual is significant to her.

Our life, Victoria, is full of feelings—too many to explain here. My life project is tending to our old customs and making new rituals with you. It starts when you scratch my head a certain way or ask a question I've never thought of, and a gap opens in the mind. For a moment the mind becomes like a vacuum salesman suddenly confronted with the vacuum of space itself and told to sell it.

When the world is overwhelmingly beautiful and sublime, it tends to be because you've made it that way, Victoria. But it's what happens after these moments of significance that is really special. In the face of the sublime, we start to play. We move from your observation that ants are like neurons, to my observation that when an ant colony eats every brain cell gets to taste the food, to a discussion of which of our friends would most like to taste food with their whole brain.

People live for the moments where a song or pizza topping overwhelms them, but these moments can have something terribly sad about them because they can't last. The mind seems ill-equipped for significance, or maybe significance is ill-equipped for the world we live in—as grocery list, gossip, and juice cleanse intensive as it is. Besides, part of why we love things like flowers is because they die so quickly.

But we have a way of making significance stay. Victoria, when we start to play, we are building a shared code for the world we experience. The flashes of shared physical contact, shared visual rapture, shared feeling of destiny-level coincidence—they become symbolized by a little dance or a jingle or even just a nickname that allows us to revisit them whenever we want.

Whenever you ask me to turn on "Doom"—Doom is the nickname Victoria and I gave to the fan in our room—whenever you ask me to turn on Doom, I remember that much-too-hot summer evening when our only possible salvation was to sign a pact for a breeze with an electric red-eyed devil with a grate for a mouth. In fact, I re-meet Doom whenever we call him Doom.

Our rituals are celebrations of the significant that reincarnate the significant. They celebrate our minds by reincarnating our minds. They celebrate a delicious pasta dish by reincarnating it in front of the mind's nose. Every time you scratch my head, we are celebrating the Festival of the Scratched Head, which marks the first time you scratched my head—the creation of the Festival of the Scratched Head.

Victoria, I'm happier with you than I have ever been. I want to solve your puzzles forever. I want you to solve mine. I want to think thoughts we've never thought before together. Every day I want to go home to you with the best parts of my day and hear them in your voice and take yours into mine and build our mind together out of them. A durable mind. A mind in which the beauty of the world will stay because it feels such kinship with our love—a very permanent love.

My whole life I've worried about my mind being too frightened to finish its thoughts. I never have to be scared again now. You will provide half of the beginnings and half of the ends of my thoughts.

You are a person of unflinching loyalty and flinching reactions to all insects and most animal life that wouldn't look cute in a bowtie. You are brilliant, have a wonderful sense of whimsy and an enveloping sweetness. When I look at you I lose peripheral vision. Instead of the world around me, I see tiny flashes of your lips and eyes. I want you to teach me how you are so good, and I'll have to study for many years with you.

These are the vows I take as your lover and as your student and as your co-ritualist:

I will peel the banana whenever you start looking around like the world grew extra worlds for you to deal with.

I will try not to enjoy my drama too much at reality's expense.

I will write you poems that make you glad I'm so dramatic at least twice a year—birthday and anniversary. It might not come on those specific days—kind of temperamental that way—this counts for this one, okay? I'll put line breaks in it, it'll be really long.

I will listen to everything you say and try hard to imagine whatever you're describing through your eyes—our shared eyes.

I promise when I fail to live up to any of these vows or any other promise, I'll make a serious effort to understand how and why I failed, and unfailingly I will try again.

I will be patient and receptive, and you will never in your life have to worry about whether or not I care about what you're saying. If it matters to you, it automatically becomes one of the most important things in my life, forever.

I will visit Reddit less.

I will remind you every day of your brilliance, your courage, your inner and outer beauty, the infinite ways you educate me and grow me every day.

I will take on all your molehills as my mountains and will help you pretend all your mountains are molehills.

I will worship you, and the worship of you will be the primary means of inquiry and knowledge discovery I have in my life.